2018 Bell Lecture

The XENON project: at the forefront of Dark Matter Direct Detection

Elena Aprile

Department of Physics
Columbia University

What is the Dark Matter which makes 85% of the matter in the Universe? We have been asking this question for many decades and used a variety of experimental approaches to address it, with detectors on Earth and in space. Yet, the nature of Dark Matter remains a mystery. An answer to this fundamental question will likely come from ongoing and future searches with accelerators, indirect and direct detection. Detection of a Dark Matter signal in an ultra-low background terrestrial detector will provide the most direct evidence of its existence and will represent a ground-breaking discovery in physics and cosmology. Among the variety of detectors used to search for dark matter in underground laboratories, liquid xenon time projection chambers (LXeTPCs) have shown the best sensitivity, thanks to a combination of very large target mass, ultra-low background and excellent signal-to-noise discrimination. I will discuss recent results from the leading experiment based on the first ton-scale liquid LXeTPC, XENON1T, and the status of its upgrade to a larger detector, XENONnT.